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Abstract

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is a space-based interferometric gravitational wave detector. In the current baseline design for the optical bench, the use of polarising optics is foreseen to separate optical beams. Therefore it is important to investigate the influence of polarising components on the interferometer sensitivity and validate that the required picometre stability in the low-frequency band (1 mHz – 1 Hz) is achievable. This paper discusses the design of the experiment and the implemented stabilisation loops. A displacement readout fulfilling the requirement in the whole frequency band is presented. Alternatively, we demonstrate improvement of the noise performance by implementing various algorithms in data post-processing, which leads to an additional robustness for the LISA mission.

Fig. 4 Schematic of the setup to reduce environmental influences: the vacuum system is places on an optical table with passive vibration isolation, whilst the pump system is located under the optical table and isolated via a diaphragm bellows. A thermal shield inside the chamber isolates the optical bench from temperature fluctuations.

Fig. 7 Angular noise of a measurement in air but enclosed by the vacuum chamber (grey) along with one conducted for a few days in the evacuated chamber (blue) and after reaching a state close to thermal equilibrium (red).

Fig. 8 Displacement noise of the p-interferometer to show the effect of data postprocessing: Green: initial measurement with OPD stabilisation and polarisation control in vacuum, Red: with stray light correction, Grey: with angular noise correction, Orange: with frequency noise correction and Blue: with temperature noise correction.

Fig. 10 The measured displacement of the polarising interferometer ΔLp–ref versus the displacement of the piezoelectric element (PZT). The solid red line represents the deviation of measured data to a straight line.